ran at nowhere near enjoyable speed here most of the time (c2q@2.5ghz, 9800GT, 4GB, WinXP) but from what I gathered I'm unsure about the visuals. Particles are certainly fun ... but not exactly something a demo should be completely based on ... especially when the current hardware limits still make them look grainy
Soundtrack is a fucking killer tho ... loved the glitching at the end.

Outstanding level of detail, excellent visuals. Great atmosphere, thanks to the soundtrack (after Blunderbuss I have to say again that Radiohead and Keane meets demoscene here. And I really like that!)

Lovely soundtrack, visuals were good yet again too, and there were some VERY nice scenes (streets, submerges subway station), but somehow it didn't feel like a "whole" as much as Agenda. Still, amazing...

Contrary to stjin i felt this did feel more like a complete, connected, and whole product more than Agenda. As xernobyl said it's like a music video, and I love that, soundtrack is totally awesome and the visuals connect to it perfectly, i could watch this "demo" over and over :)

I definitely like this more than Agenda, uses the same technique but in better ways and in a more likeable for me demo (more beautiful scenes, nice music from Hunz).

I love the beginning (which is one of the few parts that still run at a decent speed in my laptop) and the end. Love the water particles too, exploding houses, real 3d stuff with all those massive point sprites.

What can I say? I watched it in slow deadly motion and still liked it. Something that didn't happened before for some reasons with Agenda demo. I gotta see the video now. It's gonna be more awesome..

The music is awesome and the demo is really nice but too slow even with my 280 GTX.
It's remind my entrelaced raytracing demo of the middle of 90 who run at 5 fps. And the synchros glitches are too much and too frequent with a low fps it's seems that tey are real bugs...

so we had many particles, now we have shitloads of particles. whats next? infinite particles? :)
but seriously, this demo is quite perfect. visually and technically amazing scenes which are supported by the great soundtrack.

Reminds me so much of Radioheads "Go to Sleep" video in so many ways! This is NOT a bad thing! Everything about the demo just screams "LOOK AT ME AND FAP 'TILL YOU BLEED!" On the strength of the track used, i'll be getting the album! Great work guys, you made me cry............. AGAIN!!!! \:D/

can't run it decently on my "old Hardware Q9450 + HD4870 so watched the video and
i was smashed by the show , technically very advanced & impressive , more than "Agenda Circling Forth" the music & direction are great..

Another killer demo from Fairlight&CNCD.
I love the technical excellence of this demo, those millions of particles and uber awesome water shows that there are almost no limits to the mighty Fairlight code wizard smash :)
The content is also amazing, excellent track linked with excellent scenes.

Watching Smash seminar before watching the demo seriously affected my experience with this one. On the seminar he talked about these buildings exploding effect, with all the NDA joke and everything but he didn't showed the actual result.

Well, it's hard to compete with imagination. What I imagined was a much nicer than what I saw. Oh well.

It was great to see hunz back, I was seriously considering using one of his tunes to bring him back but I'm glad someone else did before me.

As someone has mention, it does indeed have a Radiohead - House of Cards. Feeling similarities (music style + particle cities + 3d deformations).

I find the 2d distortions really removes a lot of the particle magic. I would have done 3d distortions of the particles on those sync points.

However, it's a really nice show and it has a couple of memorable effects.

Much more my cup of tea already! :] But can someone please capture this on a decent machine to I can watch and thumb this. Runs slow like hell on my laptop... Eeek!! k watched it on capped! Awesome! Even more thumb than the last particle-demo!! :]

Oh SHIT :D! I wish to much that I could've seen this on the big screen. Just so BEAUTIFUL! The fire effects, the underground water sequences, the buildings being torn apart. This looks more technically advanced than "Agenda..." and the music is very moody. Sounds a bit like Radiohead actually :). Very, VERY nice!

So how much of the dot processing is done in the vertex processor? I don't understand how you do shading. Are you using some other rendering technique aside from "fuck load of dots" and applying shadow and shading stuffs to the dots or is it all processed with the dots? If it's all just with dots, I don't get it. I understand that the dots move around sometimes gravitating towards a parent object interpolating their position and possibly a normal (for the reflective spheres, reflecting off a cube-map or something) but keeping their color. Do the dots get shaded by the world of dots? or is this pre-computed and static as they move around? It's a neat effect

sigflup: It's almost all done in various pixelshaders. There's a long post on the techniques used in Agenda Circling Forth in this blog post by Smash, and presumably Ceasefire uses the same basic concepts.

Demo got too choppy after the candle scene on my old PC. http://alpha.zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt (Windows box). Even exiting took a while Is it because of my ATI Radeon 4870 video card with 512 MB of VRAM? I think it is because Windows XP Pro. SP3's task manager showed 2.2 GB of peak memory (commit charge)! :(

Everything was amazing. Well done. However, glitching all over that phoenix really, I wouldn't say annoyed, more disappointed that I couldn't see the thing in all it's magnificence, it dampened the effect with a bit of frustration on what I kinda hoped would be the climactic part. Thanks for doing this stuff, though. I think I might be just echoing what others have said but I find your contributions are exremely appreciated.

Getting Hunz back to the scene (or actually vice versa :) deserves a thumb up alone. And when it's combined by such a fine selection of visuals the result very much reassures me of why i'm still in this after all those years.

Only downside: Some of the static backgrounds feel too... static. I can understand the ppl who said "Agenda was better" because in Agenda it felt like there was more going on everywhere. But that's just a small nitpick.

Also: Yes, buy the album. And if you've still got reservations, download Hunz' free album "Thoughts that Move" first. Should be enough to get you hooked. :)

Loving the creds part in the beginning, the waves always do it for me and it was clear from the beginning it was a phoenix!

I bet it would be just so easy for Smash & co to beat up ASD in the solid 3D game if they wanted to, but I can't nothing but appreciate taking different directions and keeping up the "hack up a demo in two weeks" -spirit :)

good music, lovely exploding buildings scene and nothing more. combination of this particular vvisuals and music doesn't work for me this time. just a piggy. i preciate the effort of making this anyway.

well, the credit scene is cool and the exploding city has it's moments but as a whole demo it doesn't manage to effect me.
the music is well-balanced without any doubt. but the radiohead vibe is too obvious aand doesn't help the visuals.

Let me start by saying that a thumb up is the only option for this demo. I can't see how it is possible that one is not moved by what we see and hear in this performance.

Ceasefire continues the great particle saga (and I do think there is room for a final third demo) started earlier this year with agenda circling forth. Whether you like this ceasefire or agenda more is a matter of personal taste. I find agenda more esoteric and artistic while ceasefire is a better presentation of the high-end code. Both demos are understated and (may I say) overlooked.

But I also think that this time Fairlight has fallen victim of the limitations of their own technology. While watching it you feel that so much more could have been made using a slightly more active camera and a more imaginative movement of particles. But these additions (I assume) cannot happen that easily, as technology dictates where and how camera has to move. And that, in a way, is a shame.

In any case, this is one of those rare demos that people outside the scene will talk about for a long time. And that give it another thumb up from me.

This felt very well packaged with both technical skillz and style but without any need for an agressive direction which is helped by the soundtrack. This sort of signature is a clear winner in my eyes. If anyone did not see the presentation Smash gave on Saturday at Assembly which included the tech involved then I would definately recommend you to watch it. you will learn a lot or even if you arent technically minded and you will appreciate the recent flt releases even more from the sheer volume of processes / passes these effects / scenes take.

One effect demo but what an effect and used in so many different ways! and the particles syncing is just... astounding! The music is really cool but it sounds more like a commercial music than a demo music. Anyway, who cares! :)

I'm going to thumb up, because it's high quality stuff, but I don't like the demo itself, will certainly not watch it again soon.

That being said, it's interesting to see that the demo from ASD and that one have similar reaction from people, many people loving each demo, but significant numbers of individual loving or hating particular parts of each demo. For each person saying they hate the guitar in aMusic's piece you can find another person saying that the music is awesome, similar thing with the lyrics in Ceasefire :)

This has instantly become one of my favorite demos. As an artist I don't really know what goes on behing the courtain, code-wise. I try to ask a few questions and most of the time the answer makes sense to me. I have tried to code simple things and they worked 50% of the time. I have only the faintest idea of how this is done.

All this to say my favorite thing about the demoscene is the cool surprises that come from it. This is a demo I can show anyone and believe they will appreciate it. Some can see it as a music video or a short film. It's a bit beyond scene aesthetics. It's gorgeous. It's not too much like a music video, it's way better.

The song took me by surprise, I really liked it and it reminds me of Radiohead (the whole demo reminds me of the "Go to Sleep" video). It's really good checking the comments out and not seeing the shitstorm that wetn on last time.

I remember myself deciding again to leave the demoscene (from the coders' perspective) after watching this demo :)

It's too difficult to really compete with prods like this.

The music captivated me from the very first second, and the burning match at the beginning, with the music, represents one of the best demoscene moments I have experienced this year. but not everything is nice with this prod.

I felt a lack of coherence between the scenes, a nonsense. We move from fire to water, from someone floating in the microverse to balls moving through a channel in the city... and the end is too easy. I was expecting a grand finale, something glorious, empowered by the soundtrack, instead of a crescendo of noise and distortions that suddenly turn to silence.

Only for the first ten seconds, the thumb up is instantaneous, but as the checkboxes have misteriously dissapeared from pouet i will do it later

This is epic. I have no doubt that its prods like this that could make the demoscene mainstream art. Whether that's a good thing or not I'm not sure, but this has massive appeal for a huge audience. Absolutely stunning.

The rest: obviously great but it didn't catch me the way agenda did, I guess 50% due to the music (which is great, but just not quite my taste) and 50% because of the rendering (which rules, but it's like those red/blue 3d glasses, the 3d effect is cool but it's not something I'd want for my daily tv viewing).

Still incredible work, technically amazing and the design + scenes were brilliant.

what i like most about this production is that it seems to me that there is an idea behind it which kind of influences the whole thing, not a style showdown, no boombastic mixture of state of the art stuff, i sort of remains simple and on the spot but still blows your mind! i miss that a lot in most demos! (not excactly sure if anyone knows what i'm talking about)

anyway, here's my regular comment: I DIG YOUR STYLE MORE AND MORE EVERY TIME!

Some minor issues here and there (timing's off in the explosion part, ugly pipe/candle mesh in the final part...) and a soundtrack that is not easy to get used to (although I admit that it's catchy in a way). But yeah, after media error and the BP '10 one, this is the 3rd modern day flt pc demo that I think works very well.

Some slow parts on a GTX 260 (though I probably shouldn't be one to complain, hehe).

Really cool, probably one of my favorite demo soundtracks of all time! The only thing I didn't like was that on parts (flaming tiki heads for example) the bottoms of the flames looked a bit cheap...Still, this to me was like what Agenda Circling Forth should've been. Thank you :)

Fairlight are back with their amazing particles worlds... Superb, once again... although there was more beauty in "Agenda" maybe...
About the music by Hunz: well... <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 I'm completely charmed! :)

liked the hunz tune, except for the drums and their arrange.
visuals are pretty familiar by now, but the scenes they made up, were great.

besides that, it's quite disappointing to see that i invested quite some $$$ on a dedicated demo gfx-card (GTX 470), which still sucks performance-wise for nearly all new releases even at 720p without AA.
feels like a slideshow sometimes and i was shocked to see that sometimes more than 1100MiB of VRAM were used. :o

gloom,keith303: admittedly this thing is not running amazingly fast on even high end hw. but i deved on a 280 gtx and it ran well, and the compomachine was a gf480 and it ran smooth there. ok probably not 60fps but a solid 30 on both configs.
we're targeting 720p and not 1080p. it doesn't gain you much at all for this given the rendering technique used, and it makes a big difference to the framerate and vram requirements.
id be interested to know in what way it's running badly - consistently slow or some occasional big stalls and slowdowns but generally ok?

smash: I'll have a look at it when I'm back from work. If my memory does not fail me though, it was low framerate overall, no dips or peaks. I'll send you my specs, framerate and other stuff in a mail instead of filling the comment-field here.

Another stunning production from the captains of the demoscene. Always steering realtime graphics into new waters, utilizing new ideas to create awsome effects topped off with great aesthetics. I salute you!

smash: I retract my "slow all the time"-statement. It must have been a combination of old drivers and long-time-since-last-reboot and selecting 1680x1050 as a resolution the last time. Today the demo ran (in 1280x720) much, much faster. There are some slowdowns however, most notably in the beginning of the reflective balls-scene, and whenever there is fullscreen glitch-distortion going on.

gloom: the start of the refracting balls scene is the one thing that slows down for us too and we're not really sure why either - no good reason for it .. :) trying to work out before we ship a fixed package with the missing dlls.
the glitch distortion "slowdown" could actually be an effect.. :) it holds the frames and messes with the order and stuff to make it look more.. glitchy. :)

smash: Sure, but because the FPS falls to below 15 in certain places, the "slowdown effect" ends up being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which spoils it's beauty (because watching the 60 FPS video-capture, it is perhaps one of the best glitch/distort-effects I have ever seen).

Even though the demo doesn't really appeal to my tastes, I just can't leave my vote as a pig when I see all the effort and innovation that's gone into this. The video capture runs better than it did on my PC and although the glitches seem too slow and intrusive, I did get a better look at the scenes and they looked great at times.

burning match is fucking ace... but overall an enjoyable demo, not as pictureperfect as ACF but great .. although the sync with glitches in the graphics and black screen pisses me off, that kind of effect is way to "powerfull" for this soundtrack, it should be used for graphics much less beautiful than these, here you want to see them all the time, not getting cut off all the time, would have been better without the noise syncs.

technically impressive, but still not enough particles to make a "proper" demo (for some meaning of "proper" that I cannot define). i think the hardware is still not there. got boring after the third "loadObject - apply curlnoise and sine", tho. i like dthe collision thing of the water particles with the columns in the parking area. and knowing smash (best coder of the demoscene?) I'm sure that that fire effect has some 3d-fluid-simulation or something crazy or well, a lot more into them that it seems.

Glad the particle tech got pushed forward (recycled forth?)
Only thing bothering me is the water in some scenes that clip with the nearplane, it breaks the illusion. Other than that it's pretty much the perfect demo: Good music, impressive tech and awesome graphics and direction to bind it all.

Hail thy mighty pixel-engine. You are so beautiful to watch, so breathtaking. I wonder if there is a pc-configuration this demo actually runs smoothly on. Maybe smash should stop using Nasa computers to develop demos so that we can watch them at home again :). Music made me almost switch off the demo, but volume control and visuals kept me going.

For me this is surely one of the best Fairlight demos ever. Truly great music and visuals, even if I can't really enjoy it realtime. The only thing I would have left out are the glitches, which in my opinion are totally unnecessary.

Wish it won ASM10. It doesn't quite try to tell a story, aside from what the song lyrics give us. The ASD prod seems to try to continue the story of Life Force, but it's just so abstract that I can't follow it at all. This demo does what its authors intended, I don't need a degree in art to comprehend what they are doing, the music is sexy, the effects are sexy. What's not to like? 10/10.

I don't like the cool particle engine as much as I dislike the glitchy visuals. Having to look hard for the occasional place where the particle stuff works visually, only then to be distracted by massive "edgy" flicker all of a sudden, it doesn't do it for me.

Okey it looks like we can get rid of obsolete polygon-based rendering altogether and switch to particles already.
And once again - please oh please don't do vocals to scene music, it's as sucky as scene poetry. At least provide a non-vocal mix and GUI with "NO FUCKING VOCALS" option.

Couldn't disagree more. I think especially the musical aspect of the demoscene really needs to detach itself from these antiquated formulas, such as having pretty much exclusively instrumental music in demos. I think the vocals in this demo really add much needed depth to the overall picture.

I think especially the musical aspect of the demoscene really needs to detach itself from these antiquated formulas, such as having pretty much exclusively instrumental music in demos. I think the vocals in this demo really add much needed depth to the overall picture.

Over-reacted vocals like the cry-like ones in this demo limit the overall impression to sadness, and this demo has enough wow-factor to make me feel HIGH. It's annoying, they missed.
Demos and vocals just don't play well, unless someone REALLY knows what he's doing.

Goosebumps all over! Although i think almost everything about this demo has already been said, i´d like to point out one thing: Smash, please continue using vocal msx on your demos! Someone (i think noby was 1st) sed something about antiquated formulas, and i couldn´t agree more. In the meanwhile there are some FLT prods with vocal msx, and i tend to say those are enhancing the overall feeling and depth of the demo(s). And let´s just be serious: Who else but Hunz could underline this the most impressive way? But i´m fading away... this is a rulzor prod, like some other FLT stuff aswell. dot.

Loved the burning match and I liked the glitching too. I had been really hoping that this would be the Smash particle system demo in which objects / models were articulated, rather than their only motion capability (other than moving them around the shot) being to turn to smoke or explode. I look forward to seeing that happen. Design was good, as expected from modern FLT productions.

I vaguely remember seeing this on the stream, and with all the others on IRC I was stunned - this was something I waited for to pop up on Pouet, just to be able to run it on my box.
Then I somehow didn't feel what I did the night on the stream, somehow the music turned me off. I do like Radiohead a lot, though this felt like somebody was trying to immitate them - and failed.
So, I gave this comment some time, some day I'll like this one again.
Tonight it seems is that night, it's one hell of an amazing demo. The logo scene, together with the exploding row of houses and of course the water just do it for me,- again.

I've walked around humming this amazing tune more than I'd probably admit ;) It's a brilliant piece of music, that works wonders in a prod like this. Very well executed and great coherence between visuals and the song.

I love this demo because it stresses out even the most impressive of system specs.

I watched this again today and it occurred to me that it seems to foreshadow the earthquake in Japan in 2011. Watch it again and you'll notice the architecture is Japanese. The scene where the buildings are being destroyed is reminiscent of a tsunami. The subway system is flooded with water. And at the end you have metallic rods (the figureheads) surrounded by water, after which they begin to burn, giving rise to a firebird which menacingly rises into the air...a metaphor for Fukushima. Anyone else see it?

This is one of my all-time favorite demos. I love the city and the metro scenes, the exploding buildings, extra touches like the speaker walls, ...almost everything! And the music is simply awesome and fits perfectly. The only thing I dislike is the end scene which somehow feels out of place, but that's a minor gripe.

@NickyDrinks: same here, hangs on loading on win8.1 x64 + hd8750m.
so i have pulled my old winxp+gf9600 box and it worked fine (well...not THAT well in terms of smooth show as it crawled to ~5fps sometimes and crashed my pc at the end but at least it runs! :).

about demo itself: you just need to watch it by yourself. unforgettable show, awesome particle modelling/syncing and of course excellent music! :)